Category Archives: Emigration

On the Present Splits in ROCOR

Introduction: The Historic Splits in the Russian Emigration

After the so-called ‘Russian Revolution’, or rather place coup d’etat, in 1917, the Russian Church in the Emigration split into three groups. These splits were purely political and based on differing attitudes to the Soviet State. However, once the Soviet Union had fallen in 1991, there was no longer any reason for those splits, except for inertia, the ‘enemy deprivation syndrome’, as it is called, the need to be ‘against’ anyone who resists global Western control (‘Globalism’). This is a phenomenon throughout the Western political elite, but also among westernised Russians. It resulted in their bloody and failed invasions of the Muslim world and in the present tragic conflict in Kiev. The latter has been used as a failed puppet and proxy to try and destroy the Russian Federation, breaking it into colonisable pieces, ready to be asset-stripped by Western mining and oil corporations, as it was in the 1990s.

The absurdity of these continuing Russian Church splits became especially obvious after the Jubilee Council in Moscow in the Year 2000, when the Church in Moscow at last openly condemned its former co-operation with the atheist State (‘Sergianism’), condemned ecumenist syncretism (‘Nikodimism’), and began the canonisation of the New Martyrs and Confessors, including that of the Imperial Family. (The number canonised is now over 30,000, and the process is continuing). Although only 57% of the small Russian émigré group in Paris returned to Moscow as late as 2018, 95% of the much larger ROCOR émigré group had formally returned in 2007. However, that was not the end of the ROCOR saga – the return was for many only formal. Since 2017, after ten years of relative stability since 2007, its bishops and 300 or so parishes, mainly very small, between 10 and 40 people in number, have been splintering into three groups.

Fragment One: The Vitalyites

We have named the first extreme after the ROCOR Metropolitan Vitaly (Ustinov) (1910-2006). He was the last pre-Revolutionary born ROCOR Metropolitan and a ferocious opponent of the Moscow Patriarchate. After agreeing to unity with Moscow in 2007, those in this extreme in fact ‘played’ the Moscow Patriarchate. Although they had signed up to unity in 2007, they simply used this canonical unity obtained for appearances. Behind the screen of canonical unity, they continued their uncanonical acts. Thus, though not concelebrating with Moscow, they can claim ‘to be in communion’ with Moscow and are therefore ‘canonical’. Though they kept a low profile at first, this became clear from 2017 on and their palace coup against the late Metr Hilarion (Kapral), whose documents they autopenned with impunity.

Composed largely of convert bishops and made up of crazy converts and CIA operatives, from 2017 on the Vitalyites, open fans of Trump, began to form yet another ‘One True Church’. They claimed to be ‘more Russian than the Russians’, (real Russians do not have to pretend) and worked to form yet another old calendarist-type, apocalyptic sect, just like the 5% who had refused to sign up to unity and left ROCOR in 2007 and immediately split into four tiny, warring groups. Vitalyite Orthodoxy is that of the ghetto and the museum and refuses to live in the real world, preferring a self-justifying, US theme-park ideal of ‘Holy Rus’. However, the present Vitalyites are unlike those far less subtle and ignorant groups who refused to sign up in 2007 and left ROCOR then, this group remained to sabotage ROCOR from inside through intrigue and deceit.

Thus, as soon as he had signed the Act of Canonical Communion in May 2007, which he had planned, the leader of this group was welcomed back from Moscow by the local Moscow Archbishop, who rejoiced and commented that ‘now we can do everything together’. That representative was shocked to hear the answer: ‘No, nothing has changed, we are not together’. This group displays the same harsh and sectarian fanaticism and cultish and judgemental phariseeism as those who had left in 2007, but works to corrupt and sectarianise the Church from inside, thinking they have outsmarted isolated Moscow, which is desperate for good PR.

These mainly Western converts display hatred for the present Russian Federation, its President, and those nostalgic for Stalin. They foolishly (or are they paid by the CIA for this stance?) also support Western propaganda efforts which call on Russian troops to leave the liberated Russian territories in the Ukraine, which had been genocided by the Kiev regime. In its hostility to the Russian Federation, this basically anti-Russian group is no different to the other Vitalyites who left ROCOR in 2007 and created similar apocalyptic ‘One True Church’ sects and rebaptise others, including Orthodox. They maintain that they are ‘the only canonical Orthodox in the world!’ This reveals their underlying, schismatic, Calvinist and Lutheran, mentality. This is not theology, it is pathology.

Fragment Two: The Neo-Sergianists

The second extreme, which is the one deliberately left in power by the bribing and flattering Vitalyites, is composed of Neo-Sergianists. They are named after Metropolitan Sergius of Moscow (1867-1944), who became Patriarch of the Russian Church for a few brief months at the end of his life by compromising with the militant atheists, receiving money and power in return. Although these ROCOR Neo-Sergianists mainly live in the USA, their view is that of Russian Federation loyalists and they have adopted the same Neo-Sergianist attitudes to wealth and centralising power as the worst elements in today’s Moscow Patriarchate. And they hold exactly the same centralist, nationalist, militarist, ritualist and clericalist attitudes which they had previously condemned, as does Moscow.

The temptations were too great for them and they succumbed. There is little spiritual and pastoral here, but, as in Moscow, much that is political. Their harsh censorship is exactly mirrored in Moscow, where, to the scandal of the faithful, the intellectuals, liberals, ecumenists and homosexuals have just censored one of the most popular akathists to the martyred Tsar. (They hate those loyal to the Tsar). The Budapest and other scandals have not yet brought them to sobriety and understanding, nor have the appalling scandals in ROCOR. Thus, Moscow is losing all Non-Russian Orthodox, in the Ukraine, Moldova, the Baltics, Belarus, Central Asia and Orthodox throughout the Diaspora, just as ROCOR is losing its Orthodox too – see below.

The Orthodox or Tikhonites

Finally, there are the rest of us, the Orthodox, who resist both extremist political factions, the Vitalyites and the Sergianists. We are also called Tikhonites. Unable to agree to uncanonical ROCOR schism, sect and self-isolation, some 10% of us former ROCOR members, all Tikhonites, have already joined other Local Churches, that is, we have joined the mainstream. However, most of the Tikhonite clergy and people, even if besieged by the Vitalyite and Neo-Sergianist bishops (the two sides of exactly the same coin – extremes always meet and collude), have so far been able to remain in ROCOR. Nevertheless, their situation is becoming more and more difficult, as all five remaining Tikhonite bishops have been ‘retired’ and the last active semi-Tikhonite (though he was coloured by Neo-Sergianism too), Archbishop Peter of Chicago, passed away.

We are called Tikhonites because we are devoted to the Russian-born American citizen, missionary to Alaska, and saint, Patriarch Tikhon of Moscow (+ 1925), previously Bishop of San Francisco and later of New York. He prophesied: ‘The night will come soon, dark and long’. Indeed, it has been. Following his arrival in New York from Le Havre in December 1898, the then Bp Tikhon gathered together Russians, Ukrainians, Carpatho-Russians, Greeks, Antiochians and Serbs and created Orthodox unity in North America, before going on to become Patriarch of Moscow and a saint. It is no surprise that the present leader of the international ‘Orthodox Church in America’ is also called Metr Tikhon. We Tikhonites also much venerate the international St John (Maximovich) (+ 1966), who was also slandered, suspended and put on trial by the then ROCOR episcopate.

We Orthodox, or Tikhonites, know that the post-1917 Russian Emigration, like the Soviet Union itself, has died out and that, living in Western countries and in post-Communist times, there is no reason for us to be separated from other Local Churches. It is our destiny to work together with other Orthodox, contributing our specific liturgical identity and our devotion to the martyred Tsar and all the other New Martyrs and Confessors. As regards the tragic conflict in the Ukraine, we are not naïve and have fully understood that this a geopolitical conflict between the aggressive and greedy atheist West and the Russian State. It has nothing to do with the Ukraine as such. That is just the battlefield. We are horrified by pictures of clergy blessing weapons of war, on both sides.

As regards President Putin, we know that he is a powerful and admired Russian nationalist politician, a very cautious lawyer and a diplomat. But clearly he is not at all our long-awaited Tsar. As the contemporary Russian historian, Peter Multatuli, great-grandson of a New Martyr faithful to the Tsar, has put it: The great mission was given to us, not by rebellious human desire, but by the will of God. Our mission has nothing to do with….so-called ‘Russian nationalism’. Our mission is the rebirth of Russian Civilisation, in which all nationalities who wish so are united for life in God and with God, in the world of Goodness and Justice, in which we can stand up to the atheistic and anti-human Western ‘New Order’, whose aim is to annihilate man as God’s creation.

France, 25 October 2025

 

My Fourth Pilgrimage to Moldova and Romania: 6-17 October 2025

It was then that falsehood came into our Russian land. The great misfortune, the root of all the evil to come, was the loss of faith in the value of personal opinions. People imagined that it was out of date to follow their own moral sense, that they must all sing the same tune in chorus, and live by other people’s notions, the notions which were being crammed down everybody’s throats.

Boris Pasternak, Dr Zhivago, Chapter 13, Section 14

Foreword: Romania and the Universal Church

It was in May 1978 that I spoke to the late Marianna Greenan, a member of the Russian émigré Behr family, about her pilgrimage to Romania. (Both the English and the French branches of the Behrs of that generation were staunch supporters of the Moscow Patriarchate). She told me how she had visited a small embroidery workshop in Romania and realised that all the workers were nuns who had been forced to leave their Convent, as the Communists had closed it. One of them who spoke some Russian explained to Marianna that she said one Jesus Prayer for every stitch that she made.

Then the woman, or rather nun, whispered to Marianna that ‘our persecution is all the fault of you Russians’. Marianna, a member of the Patriarchate, was astonished and asked why. The nun told her: ‘Because you overthrew our Orthodox Tsar and so we are all suffering’. This story has remained with me these nearly fifty years. For the whole Orthodox world has indeed suffered ever since the great treason of the upper-class Russian aristocrats and generals, among them Romanovs, in 1917: ‘All around treason and cowardice and deceit’, as the Tsar wrote.

Introduction: Carpathia and Hesychasm

My latest pilgrimage here has reminded me of my 2004 pilgrimage to the Presov Rus homeland of the ever-memorable Carpatho-Rusyn Metropolitan Lavr (Shkurla) in north-eastern Slovakia. Just across the border from Moldova, eastern Slovakia and northern Romania, Carpatho-Rus, which is still under Ukrainian occupation and so goes by the Kievan name of Transcarpathia, still has hesychast hermits living in the forests on the mountain-slopes.

St Job of Ugolka (+ 1985) was such a one. He is the still living fruit of the Athonite tradition, defended theologically against secularist humanism by St Gregory Palamas. This tradition went north from Athos through Bulgaria and Rila, to Serbia and Romania, to the Russia of St Sergius of Radonezh and his 70 monasteries. Later it passed on to St Paisy (Velichkovsky) in Neamt, St Seraphim of Sarov, the Optina Elders and St John of Kronstadt. That tradition is alive today in such Carpathian lights as Metr Onufry of Kiev.

7 October: A Meeting with Metr Vladimir of Chisinau (Moscow Patriarchate)

Most of Moldova was in pre-Soviet times known as Bessarabia, as Pushkin described, and was an integral part of Romania. However, with the Soviet occupation that large province and its churches were forced to join the Moscow Patriarchate. Since the fall of the USSR in 1991, when only some 380 churches remained open, the Church has been restored (nearly 1300 more churches repaired or built) and the people have been returning to the Romanian Church.

The return to the Romanian Church is a spontaneous movement of the people, followed, but not led, by the clergy, as several priests confirmed to me. As the elderly die out, this movement is inevitable, only those who recall Soviet times are staying with Moscow. It has become obvious that Moldova will disappear from the map of Europe within a few years and will be absorbed back into Romania, together with its Church.

Meeting at the Metropolia, Metr Vladimir told me that at present he still has 1,350 churches in this country of two and a half million, all of them using the old calendar. As for the Romanian Church in Moldova, known as the Autonomous Metropolia of Bessarabia (which mirrors the Autonomy given to the Romanian Church in Western Europe), it has taken 300 churches back from Metr Vladimir, all of them also using the old calendar.

The number returning to the Romanian Church has doubled in the last two years and is increasing every month. Other priests told me that the numbers of people leaving and taking their clergy with them, suggest that the Metropolia of Bessarabia, for now with 4 bishops, will be larger than the Moscow Patriarchate, for now with 11 bishops, within two years. The movement is one-way and has been much accelerated by the present events in the Ukraine.

Metr Vladimir admitted to me that the essence of the problem is that the Russians in Moscow treat Moldovans as ‘third-class Orthodox’ and refused to give it Autocephaly. Now it is too late for that. I told the Metropolitan that this is also exactly what Moscow does to most Moldovans in the Diaspora (apart from those under the enlightened Metr Nestor), as well as to English and French Orthodox and to other Non-Russian Orthodox in the Diaspora, stabbing us in the back. He did not know that there are now 30 Moldovan parishes under the Romanian Church in Italy, and 5 in England, with 3 which took refuge in the Romanian Church from ROCOR in 2022.

I said to him that the problem is that he is not allowed a Diaspora and that therefore he is losing most of his Diaspora Moldovans, in the same way as he is losing his churches inside Moldova. I added that we would have joined the Moldovan Church ten years ago, if it had had a Diaspora, rather than continue to be mistreated by politically-minded, Greek-hating Russians who to boot ‘dislike Romanians and only half-like Moldovans’ (and only half-like anyone who is not American), to quote one of their bishops. The Metropolitan looked as though he too had been living with that Cross for a long time. At present he cannot visit Britain or Ireland – the authorities will not grant him a visa.

Metr Vladimir asked me what our experience had been. I informed him that I had studied at St Serge in Paris with the last emigres from before the Revolution. I had spent 47 years in the Russian Church, battling for its unity and meeting two Patriarchs. I told him how a very young Metropolitan in Moscow, who has never spent any time in a monastery, literally told us, all six churches, to ‘go away’. When informed that after nearly fifty years of faithfulness to the Russian Church we would therefore be forced to join another canonical Local Church, the Romanian, the young Metropolitan had simply answered: ‘Too bad for you’.

Metr Vladimir invited us to concelebrate with him; he has no problem with the Romanian Church, despite the fact that the people are leaving him for it. You cannot go against the people when they act en masse, and he knows that. The people ask their priests: ‘We have joined the Romanian Church, will you come with us?’ The priests follow the fait accompli.

8 October: The Convent of Suruceni

Today we go to venerate the relics of St Dionysius of Bessarabia (1868-1943), a great hierarch. He did much to translate the liturgical texts into Romanian, was a patriot of Greater Romania, and his incorrupt relics lie in this beautiful convent, which is still under Metropolitan Vladimir. We venerated his relics, took part in the Akathist and spoke to the Abbess. We were impressed. One of the nuns, who had spent 20 years in the Ukraine, asked me about our views of Metr Onufry (‘a living saint’), and Metr Antony (Bloom) and St Sophrony (Sakharov) and my impressions of them both and why they had argued in 1965. I told her that our church is dedicated to St John (Maximovich), who stood above all such émigré personality disputes.

9 October: St Martha and Maria Convent

Today we went to one of the largest convents in Moldova, also still under Metropolitan Vladimir. A former Communist youth camp, it was founded in 1992 on 200 euros (!). It is a work of faith. It has three churches, one a magnificent large, frescoed church, some sixty nuns and many other very large buildings, including a boarding-school. It runs from the profits of its extensive farm. I met Fr Andrei, the elder, a most impressive spiritual father. We talked long and he spoke of his very poor childhood, when the Communists so oppressed the Church, and he described the Convent’s very, very close links with the monastery of Putna in Romania, which is a great centre of holiness. Putna donated a whole wooden church to the Convent, which stands as the third church.

11 October

Today we baptised a child and served a three-hour Vigil at the very large, brand-new church in Costinesti, a small town near Chisinau. A new Convent is being built alongside it.

12 October

Today we celebrated the Sunday liturgy in the same church. It was attended by about 150 people.

14 October

Today is the Feast of the Protection and we celebrate the liturgy in a church outside Chisinau. It is very pleasing to see most of the people, men and women alike, dressed in national costume.

15 October: Meetings with a Saint and two Bishops in Iasi

Today, my namesday, we leave at 3.30 am to go to Iasi in Romania, about three hours away. There are 500 churches in Iasi itself and another 500 outside this City of some 350,000. But the greatest glory of the Metropolia of Iasi is the relics of St Paraskeva. 200,000 pilgrims have gathered for her feast day before, on and after 14 October. We venerate her relics and can feel the warmth of her millennial hands.

We concelebrate the liturgy with the very young-looking Bishop Theofil from Bacau. Apart from all three priests and three parishioners from Colchester, there are another seventeen priests, four protodeacons and hundreds of people. A choir of young women sings magnificently with Russian chants. Communion is from three large chalices. The largest is 2.5 litres, whereas our largest Sunday chalice in Colchester is only 1.5 litres (a third of a gallon). But our altar is bigger! As is usual in the Romanian Church, this is a real concelebration, all are involved, all take an active part. This is the people’s Church. And of course the people understand everything, as the Romanian used for services is close to everyday Romanian. This is different from both the Greek and the Russian Churches.

After the Liturgy we are invited to eat with Bishop Nikifor, one of the two assistant bishops to Metropolitan Theofan of Iasi. We converse in French and Russian. He tells us that the Russian Church’s decision to go into schism and expel us, because we objected to its schism, is the Romanian Church’s gain. We reply to him that it is also our gain! Then we speak of Fr Raphael Noica, whom we both so love.

We compare the People’s Salvation Cathedral (named in typical Romanian fashion, for this is the Church of the People) in Bucharest with the main Russian Military Cathedral outside Moscow, which were both built at the same time. The People’s Salvation Cathedral is the world’s largest and tallest Orthodox Cathedral, with the largest mosaic collection in the world and the world’s largest iconostasis (407 m2). It can take 6,000 worshippers:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Salvation_Cathedral

The Russian Military Church outside Moscow, with its Communist emblems:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Cathedral_of_the_Russian_Armed_Forces

The comparison is between light and dark, between the beauty of the Ascension (which is the dedication) and an attempt to intimidate by military victory.

Leadership in today’s Romanian Church is under the influence of the new saints. They are the glory of the Romanian Church, its New Martyrs and Confessors, St Arsenie Boca, St Arsenie Papacioc, St Sofian Boghiu, St Dumitru Stăniloae, my own favourite, St Cleopa Ilie, the Shepherd of the Carpathians, and many others. Fr Cleopa was a living saint, a living icon, the people’s shepherd. These saints are the guarantee of the independence and freedom of the Church from politicians. They have the Tradition of life.

Why are the Patriarchates of Constantinople and Moscow not also under the influence of their Saints? Both have plenty of new and great saints and pastors, Athonite Elders like St Paisios and St Porphyrios, or New Martyrs and Confessors, but somehow their politically-minded episcopates seem to have sidelined these pastors and the veneration of the new saints is often nominal.

16 October: Back in Moldova

In a town outside Chisinau I meet one of the most senior priests in Moldova, a theologian, born in Romanian North Bukovina, which Stalin stole and added to the Ukraine in 1945, though this priest has lived in Moldova for decades. I will call him Fr X. We discuss our many mutual acquaintances, living and reposed: Patriarch Alexiy II, Patriarch Kyrill, Metr Onufry of Kiev (who is so similar to the ever-memorable Metr Lavr (Shkurla)), Metr Tikhon (Shevkunov), Metr Antony (Bloom), St Sophrony (Sakharov), Fr Alexander Schmemann.

Interestingly, Fr X. wears his mitre and two crosses only at Easter. I have the same custom, wearing them only ‘for the sake of the feast’, ‘radi prazdnika’. We have the same attitude to such pompous awards. He gives me an icon of St Alexander, a local New Martyr, martyred by the Soviets in Kazan in 1943.

He tells me that several of the local Moscow Patriarchate bishops are either married or else divorced, one is a politician in a cassock, only one is a monk. I tell him that the situation is no different from in Russia, but that I prefer the ones who are still married, at least they are normal. Those who could not live with their wife may have some personality flaw and, unmarried, they may have other vices. It is what the Apostle Paul recommended, that candidates be ‘the husband of one wife’. There are of course the homosexuals, of whom there is only one notorious case in Moldova, though quite a minority of the episcopate in Russia and elsewhere is, as the Budapest affair publicly proved, even to the naïve and the liberals.

I suggest that Moscow, like Constantinople, spends too much time consorting with the Pope of Rome and that his Papism has rubbed off on them. Fr X. corrects me and says that the Pope of Rome would love to have as much power and money as they have in Moscow and Constantinople.

Fr X., who knows Metr Vladimir very well, both before and since transferring to the Romanian Church, once accompanied Metr Vladimir to Romania on a secret trip to negotiate the transfer of his Church to the Romanian Church. Fr X. commented that Metr Vladimir would like to take the whole of his Moldovan Church to the Romanian Church, instead of seeing batches of parishes go to the Romanian Church, one group at a time, the largest batch so far numbering sixty, which was just over a year ago. However, Metr Vladimir cannot transfer, for he is a prisoner, a political hostage. As for the pieces of paper ‘defrocking’ clergy who join the Romanian Church, the Metropolitan told everyone to ignore them – they are purely political documents, which he is forced to issue ‘by the powers that be’.

We agree that the problem is that so many in the Russian Church think in the Soviet categories of atheism and nationalism, as politicians and businessmen in cassocks, but not as pastors. After 1991 they changed from atheism to Orthodoxy overnight, but only in dress. Pastors would long ago have granted autocephaly to any Church which is present in any numbers in the thirteen independent Republics, apart from Russia and Georgia which already had autocephalous Churches, that the USSR broke up into. Now, through its Soviet centralisation, Moscow is losing everything. It is this purely secular and political centralisation of power which makes clericalist Moscow bishops into militaristic generals, who then bully, humiliate and intimidate priests as soldiers whose task is to carry out rituals (‘treboispolniteli’).

We come to the discussion of the conflict in the Ukraine and the delusional attitude of the West. I mention that Hitler in his last months was also delusional, as were his propaganda media. People are always delusional, when they are losing a war. This delusion comes from hubris, as was Hitler’s case, as is the EU’s case and that of all the other Globalists. Hubris comes from the need for victory instead of reconciliation, which friendly groups promote. Hubris in today’s case too indicates a loss of contact with reality and the huge overestimation of the West’s own competence, accomplishments and capabilities. As they say, ‘pride goes before the fall’. As for Narcissus, he rejected the advances of all who approached him, and instead fell in love with his own reflection in a swamp. The swamp in Washington?

Fr X. criticises President Putin. He said to me that the President does not like the martyred Tsar. President Putin considers that the Tsar was weak in 1917, he should have fought against his enemies, even if millions had died.  I comment that for me the Tsar is a criterion of Orthodoxy and that in this way President Putin shows that he is still a Soviet man, without understanding of Christian martyrdom, of the Sts Boris and Gleb attitude of Tsar Nicholas. This rejection of the Tsar’s attitude was precisely the error of the Whites, who created the Russian Civil War, in which perhaps four million people died. The Whites, led by anti-Bolshevik and also anti-Tsar generals and traitors, disobeyed the Tsar, who wanted only peace.

The Tsar knew that it would be useless to fight militarily against the Bolsheviks. Apostasy can only be cured by misfortune – you cannot halt it by force. Thus, Bolshevism was only stopped by the satanic intervention of Hitler, who murdered 27 million people of the old Russian Empire. The White Orthodox Emigration, from which I was issued, initially through the influence of the Benckendorffs 39 years after the Revolution, has prayed for 100 years and more for the coming of a new Tsar, like St Nicholas, and who will reverse the injustices of 1917. But that can only come through repentance and humility, when Russia is spiritually ready. It is still far from that.

I emphasise to him that the White Orthodox Emigration was only a small part of the whole White Emigration. This was composed for the most part of capitalists and traitors to Russia, greedy and grasping people who only hated the Communists because the latter had stolen their property from them, and not because they opposed Communist atheism – they themselves were atheists and as such also opposed the Church and the Tsar. From the Orthodox viewpoint, they were not White at all, rather they were Black, and in the Russian Civil War, which Tsar Nicholas had avoided, they carried out just as many atrocities as the Reds.

Fr X. asks me about the Russian Emigration and why it split into three parts. I tell him that all was determined by the attitudes of the key players, clergy and laity, to the Soviet State. Those who remained in the Patriarchate were coloured by their deep Soviet patriotism and even support of Stalin. Those who went to Paris, mainly very Westernised Saint Petersburg aristocrats, had overthrown the Tsar and wanted a Western-style Parliament, whereas those in ROCOR were simply anti-Communists, who wanted to restore the pre-Revolutionary State, despite all its social injustices and Church decadence (communion at best once a year) and careerism. Virtually no-one was creative and looked to recreating not the pre-Revolutionary Sate of nominal Orthodoxy, bureaucracy and corruption, but Holy Rus’, except perhaps for the repentant Kartashov.

16 October: Exhibition for Queen Marie

In the afternoon we are invited to the town of Straseni, where there is an exhibition at the Museum dedicated to Queen Marie of Romania (1875-1938). Queen Marie was a unique Anglo-Russian figure, the daughter of Prince Alfred (a son of Queen Victoria) and Grand Duchess Maria Alexandrovna, daughter of Tsar Alexander III of Russia, aunt of Tsar Nicholas II and the Tsarina. She married Ferdinand of Romania, who became King of Romania.  In 1926 Queen Marie adopted the Orthodox Faith (she did not remain Anglican, as some falsely claim on the internet and on AI, though she later had sentimental sympathies for Bahai). She is much loved here, as she played a great diplomatic role for Romania at the Versailles Peace Conference, wrote over 30 books and spoke poetically of her love for Romania, helping to create Greater Romania, of which she was the last Queen and best ambassadress:

https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?q=maria+of+romania+film&&mid=8DF9E3904F0F41D6455E8DF9E3904F0F41D6455E&FORM=VAMGZC

Queen Marie, the cousin of King Charles’ great-grandfather, spoke very good Romanian, albeit with an English accent, and was immediately loved by Romanians, being renowned for her beauty, wisdom and love of her adopted country and its customs. Later Communist slanders are not believed. Below are some of her sayings:

Nothing is far when you want to get there.

Nothing is ours really, not even our own souls.

In much knowledge there is also much grief.

To be entirely happy in marriage, the same thing must be important to both.

Fashion exists for women with no taste, etiquette for people with no breeding.

Photographs were taken of our international delegation to the Museum.

17 October

We return to England and hear the tragic but unsurprising news that the Anglican Communion has now officially split into two, with the woke side, led by Canterbury and numbering about 15% of the whole, falling away from the African-led orthodox majority.

On the other hand, we hear the good news that our Archdiocese has obtained a very large former church in Peterborough, which we will use, once we have spent £300,000 on needed repairs. We already have the money. This will further increase and strengthen our Orthodox presence in our native East of England. The Local Church is being constructed. This is God’s work.

 

From Feast to Feast: Nine Days in the Life of

Saturday 20 September

Today, the third Saturday of the month, we have our monthly English liturgy. As usual, the Liturgy is held in the little church and takes only one hour, ending at 10.20, though I do give a long instructional talk of 20 minutes afterwards. Then those who came, a mixture of English parishioners and Russian parishioners with their children – the parents want their children to understand the Liturgy – have tea together in the meeting room. We mix with those who attend the Saturday Russian School which takes place later in another room.

Sunday 21

I arrive at church, as usual, at about 7.15 am. Preparation and the Proskomidia take one and a half hours. We have many tens of thousands of names to commemorate, so we can only pray for all the names once a year. The second priest arrives at 7.30, but has to go to the hospital to give communion to a very sick elderly woman. He is back at 8.30. Then confessions begin at 8.45 with all three priests available and the two deacons helping. The Liturgy begins more or less on time at 9.20. After the Liturgy, I have a Russian memorial service, a Moldovan baptism, and then there are people to see individually. I get home at 3.30.

Monday 22

Today I am visiting Count and Countess Benckendorff at their rose-gardened thatched home in Suffolk. We have not seen one another for a good discussion for several months. First, we discuss what we need to do for next Sunday (see below). Countess Benckendorff will prepare some white roses (white because they are White Russians) for the graves, where the parish has erected new wooden crosses after nearly 100 years. Above all we speak of our favourite topic, the future of Russia and the Russian Church, against the background of the latest news from Russia.

Although both Benckendorffs were born, brought up and worked in the Soviet Union, they have worked through and understood the problems of the last century of Russian history. They are both appalled by the present civil war in the Ukraine and how the West has sponsored it against the interests of both peoples. But the peoples themselves are also responsible. We agree that all this horror is the result of the aftermath of both waves of Westernisation, the Marxist-Soviet one before the 1990s and, from the 1990s on, the Capitalist one of the oligarchs. Both were the result of the Western-organised regime change operation in 1917, known falsely as ‘The Russian Revolution’, that we should rather call ‘The Russian Degeneration’.

As regards the Military Operation in the east and south of the old Soviet Ukraine, it has always been clear to us from the outset that giant Russia would win militarily against small Ukraine, even with full NATO backing, rather as if in a conflict between Germany and Belgium, it would be clear that Germany would win, however much Belgium was backed by outside meddlers. However, from the outset it has equally always been clear that the Russian Church would lose. A Church, one third of whose members are Non-Russians, has lost one third of its members and been turned into an ever more centralised, clericalised and militarised ghetto, hostile to the people and to the spiritual. The violent and conscious rejection of Non-Russians and the Orthodox mission to Western Europe by the now nationalist Russian Church hierarchy for purely political reasons has been its huge loss.

Both the Count and Countess have a great fondness for their distant cousin, Count Paul Benckendorff, brother of Count Alexander, the last Imperial ambassador at the Court of St James (London). Count Paul was very close to the martyred Tsar, ready to die for him, and wrote the book ‘Last Days at Tsarskoe Selo.’ Their view is that in 1917 Russia committed suicide, betrayed by its corrupt aristocracy, the oligarchs of that age, and it still has not recovered from that suicide, even though we are now advancing on the road to recovery, especially compared to fifty years ago.

This can be seen very clearly in the Russian Church hierarchy, as it goes from one scandal to another, to the despairing patience of the faithful clergy and people, more and more of whom are boycotting it, as they have been let down. There is far to go to restore the original Russian Church, as it was before Peter I, the ensuing bureaucratisation and increased ritualisation. The problem is not that the State persecutes the Church or forces it into obedience, it is people inside the Church who think that the Church must imitate the State, just as in the Church of England.

Another thing we agree on is that the decadence in Russia in 1917 was shown by the fact that people no longer took communion, at best, only once a year, often indeed never after baptism. In effect, by 1917 Russia had fallen out of communion with Christ and into the ritualism of the pharisees who can express only hatred. Here is how the leaders of the once persecuted Church became persecutors.

Tuesday 23

Today I bless the home of an English Orthodox family in Bury St Edmunds. Afterwards N. comments that the alien British Establishment want us to rejoin the Globalist EU project (did we ever leave it?), continue the greedy Globalists’ war in the Ukraine in order to exploit all its natural resources, and increasingly control and censor us as they are authoritarians. N. adds that ‘the present Prime Minister claims that we have free speech and if anyone disagrees with him, they will be arrested’. I suggest that all may change, once the leaders of Germany, the UK and France fall, since they are all extremely unpopular, indeed are hated.

I listen to him with a smile, but change the subject to history and say how the problem of Western Europe is that it was conquered by barbarians like the Franks, Vikings and Normans.  As a result, the twentieth century was patterned by the descendants of these barbarians with their barbarian World Wars, fighting against neo-pagans – Communists and Nazis.

In the afternoon I collect the up-to-date statistics for our Church in Western Europe. Our two bishops in the British Isles and Ireland now have dioceses of 119 priests and 19 deacons in 95 parishes and 5 monasteries. We are part of the two Autonomous Metropolias of Western Europe, of Western and Southern Europe, and Central and Northen Europe. They include even our parishes and missions in Finland, the Faeroes, Iceland and Greenland. We now have 10 bishops, 859 parish churches and 30 monasteries, with the number of churches increasing regularly.

We have come a long way from the days of liturgies in front rooms and sheds, with 10-20 huddlers in the catacomb churches of the 1970s. When there were more than 25 people present, they would say: ‘There were a lot of people at church today!’ However, these conditions still endure in the present Russian Church in the Diaspora, which still suffers so grievously from its past errors. Thus, the Russian Church in the Diaspora (ROCOR) may have up to 300 parishes altogether, but only about 50 of them have more than 100 parishioners for Sunday liturgies. Most have between 10 and 40 mainly converts. But we are now in the normal mainstream, in churches that have hundreds of parishioners present every Sunday.

Fr Ioan Nazarcu, our old friend, whom we have known for 15 years, and for some years now has been a priest, has just given the Economist magazine an interview. Although this Rothschild magazine is atheist in ideology, Fr Ioan, whose English is excellent, has been able to give them a first-rate interview.

https://www.economist.com/britain/2025/09/22/the-orthodox-church-is-thriving-in-britain-thanks-to-immigration

Wednesday 24

Today I have my day off and am at home, dealing with domestic matters and building work. 

Thursday 25

Today I bless a Ukrainian-Moldovan home in Basildon near east London. The parents are worried about transgender propaganda at school and are thinking of returning to Moldova to protect their children from it. I stop at church to get everything ready for the feast on Saturday. It takes me two hours. Then I bless the home of a Russian family in Colchester and stay for tea and conversation. They have just returned from Moscow, which is now very vibrant and generally more prosperous than Western cities, which have so many social problems and suffer from litter, graffiti and potholed roads and pavements.

Friday 26

Today I am seeing Moldovan and Romanian parishioners in Stowmarket in Suffolk and in Diss across the border in Norfolk. I will not make it to the canon this evening in Colchester, where 30-40 Romanian parishioners gather more or less every Friday evening or sometimes at midnight for a Liturgy. Fr Ioan will, as always, cope very well.

Saturday 27

Today is the Feast of the Exaltation for our Russian, Ukrainian and Moldovan parishioners. About 50 people are in church. Afterwards I baptise an adult Russian. 

Sunday 28

 I head to church at 6.45. After the Liturgy, we have the meeting of St Alban’s Circle, our youth group. About sixty people attend. The subject is the life of St John of Shanghai. Meanwhile, Fr Ioan is doing baptisms in the main church, while Fr Sergey has a memorial service in the little church. At 1.20, I leave for Claydon cemetery outside Ipswich and the graves of Countess and Count Benckendorff, wife and son of the last Imperial ambassador, Count Alexander. They are distant cousins of the present Benckendorffs. People place roses on the graves of Countess Sophia, Count Konstantine and his wife Maria Korchinska. I get home at 3.30

At home I have to start getting ready for my pilgrimage to Moldova and Romania from 6 to 17 October.

 

 

Winner Takes All: The Self-Destruction of the Church of the Russian Emigration

In the years following the so-called Russian Revolution in 1917, the Church of the resulting Russian Emigration split into three parts. A few, very few, remained under the Church centred in Moscow, which eventually became known as the Moscow Patriarchate. Most of the emigres considered that that was a ‘Soviet Church’, a Communist-controlled organisation and, since members of their families had died fighting against Communism and they had been exiled by it, they would have nothing to do with its Church. This vast majority of emigres themselves split into two, a smaller group and a larger group.

The smaller group, centred at its Cathedral on Rue Daru in Paris and existing mainly in France, was founded and led by Saint Petersburg aristocrats who had overthrown the Tsar in order to introduce a pro-Western regime, either a Constitutional Monarchy or else a masonic Republic. The larger group, called ROCOR (Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia), centred at first in Germany and then in New York, and with parishes above all in Germany, the Americas and Australia, was founded and led by emigres who, whatever their politics, were united by a profound hatred of Communists, who had stolen their land and wealth.

Obviously, now 108 years on after 1917, both groups are dying out, even though the New York group was much reinforced by the anti-Communist Russian emigration of 1945. As a result, the last pre-Revolutionary Archbishop of the Paris group died in 1981, and the last pre-Revolutionary Metropolitan of the reinforced New York group was deposed by his fellow-bishops in 2001 and died in 2006. Since then both groups have staggered on, declining in every way.

Both groups have since then much contracted, largely having failed to pass on the Faith to the descendants of the emigres, who are now in their fifth generation. Those born in the Diaspora have overwhelmingly been assimilated and lost all their Russian heritage. All that has survived is the political liberalism of the Paris group and the political conservatism (sometimes extreme conservatism) of the New York group. In other words, despite their radical contraction and the radical changes in their composition, their political identities have survived. However, their spiritual identity has been greatly weakened.

Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, these political identities have largely become irrelevant, mere history. Moreover, both the ageing and ever-smaller groups were dwarfed by the post-1991 emigration of young people from the former Soviet Union, who automatically became part of the much-expanded Moscow Patriarchate. These young people found the two old émigré groups to be museum pieces and so irrelevant. As a result, both émigré groups had to join the Moscow Patriarchate, though keeping a measure of internal independence.

Today, both groups are being dismantled, or rather, are dismantling themselves, as both suffer from the same suicidal disease: a lack of bishops who know the canonical Russian Tradition and, as a result of this total lack of leadership and Christian example, a lack of money. The flock will not follow wolves. For example, after 1917 both groups built some churches, or much more often, converted buildings for Orthodox use, the majority of them very small, built for fewer than a hundred parishioners. However, they also inherited some splendid pre-Revolutionary church buildings, such as:

In Italy the two churches in Florence and San Remo, currently under ROCOR, but formerly under the Paris Archdiocese.

In Paris the Cathedral of the Paris Archdiocese.

In France the ruinous churches in Cannes, Biarritz and Pau. Although it is forbidden to enter the Cannes church, as it is too dangerous, the increasingly aggressive and increasingly small and impoverished ROCOR is paradoxically engaged in a court action against its own Mother-Church, the Moscow Patriarchate, in order to obtain property rights over this ruin.

In Switzerland the ROCOR churches in Geneva, Lausanne and Vevey.

In Germany, several ROCOR churches, such as those in Wiesbaden, Darmstadt, Baden-Baden.

The two ROCOR convents in Jerusalem.

Most of these churches suffer from dwindling congregations and so dwindling income. Some are going to fall down, if they do not soon receive tens of millions of euros for repair and restoration. Clearly, in order to avoid this, only direct transfers of the buildings to the cash-rich Moscow Patriarchate can, as happened to the two former Paris Archdiocese churches in Nice and the former ROCOR church in Bari in Italy, solve the problem. In the matter of restoring historic buildings, the Moscow Patriarchate will be much aided by the Russian State, which is keen to recover pre-Revolutionary Russian historic monuments, even if they are in a ruinous state.

In this long game of chess between the 99%, the very large Mother-Church, and the 1%, the two tiny émigré fragments, there can only be one winner, the Mother-Church, the Moscow Patriarchate. It will take it all. As we said, this has already taken place in Nice and Bari, but also in Indonesia, where in 2016 ROCOR voluntarily handed over all its sixteen mission parishes to the Moscow Patriarchate, admitting that it could not cope with them. Once one of the last old, Russian-speaking ROCOR bishops has left the stage, many of the churches in Germany will certainly transfer to the Moscow Patriarchate, as their clergy and people come almost all from the ex-Soviet Union.

As one Moscow Patriarchate Metropolitan told me recently: ‘Their churches are like ripe fruit hanging from a tree which will fall into our hands’. In other words, the Patriarchate does not have to do anything, except to wait patiently for the Church of the Emigration to dismantle itself, as the Emigration self-destructs after the deaths of educated, Russian-speaking bishops, who are faithful to the Russian Orthodox Tradition, and not to weird old calendarist or new calendarist pseudo-theologies, or rather fantasies.

We have descended a long, long way from the hopes expressed by the ever-memorable Patriarch Alexei II in 2003 (yes, already nearly a generation ago!) that the Western European Metropolia of the Moscow Patriarchate would become the foundation of a future Western European Local Church. That is now a mere daydream to be forgotten in the cold light of reality, the incompetence, corruption and immorality of various bishops of the Moscow Patriarchate, the liberalism of a large minority in the Paris Archdiocese, who then left it, and the schismatic and sectarian isolation of the ROCOR bishops, who still have not left it and officially founded some weird pseudo-Russian old calendarist sect, which is what they are.

Anyone has the right to leave a Church which has broken communion with another Church. That is what was done when ROCOR broke communion with part of the Moscow Patriarchate. For anyone and everyone can leave a group which enters into schism. The floodgates are opened. Moscow went to the casino, bet all its money on the wrong number and the wheel has spun and chosen another. Russia has always been betrayed by the traitors of the fifth column. In the early 17th century, boyars betrayed it to the Poles, 1917 aristocrat-traitors destroyed the Russian Empire, in 1991 oligarch-traitors destroyed the Soviet Union, and today wealthy traitors have been allowed to undermine the Russian Church.

The results are the anti-Ukrainian, anti-Moldovan and anti-English actions of Moscow and its increasing centralisation, ritualisation, nationalisation and militarisation, as it has cut itself off from communion with other Local Churches. To return to even the situation of hope of 2003 will take decades. Just like the Patriarchate of Constantinople before it, Moscow has hit the ball into the court of others, who are busy constructing what Moscow failed to do. God gave Moscow an opportunity on a silver plate; it rejected it. Now it will have to deal with the suicidal consequences, exactly as we have been warning ever since 2003. The opportunity has been presented to others.

For the Orthodox Diaspora, does this matter? Probably not, because the policy of the Moscow Patriarchate in the Diaspora has increasingly become that of a nationalist ghetto. It lives in isolation from, and so is irrelevant to, the vast majority of Diaspora Orthodox, who are not Russian. The only hope is that the Moscow Patriarchate will cast off its present nationalist and racist isolationism, returning to communion with the rest of the Orthodox Church.

Only then will Moscow return to the glorious heritage of the two great Russian saints of the Diaspora, in the USA St Tikhon of New York and Moscow, and in Europe, St John of Shanghai and Western Europe, the latter the greatest man of the Russian emigration. They did not listen to St John, they persecuted him, suspended him, put him on trial and have done exactly the same to his disciples. The price they are having to pay for that is already very heavy indeed. God is not mocked.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hopes for the Future of the Orthodox World: A Personal View

Foreword

I sometimes feel as though I have lived four lives. The first was childhood and youth. The second was over fifty years ago with the old Russian emigration in England and France. Already old then, those ‘antediluvian’ emigres died out in the last century. I knew them all – the Zernovs, Golitsyns, Andronikovs, Tieshenhausens, Lopukhins, Kovalevskys, Rosenschilds, Meyendorffs, Schememanns, Ossorgins, Kedrovs, Rehbinders, Nelidovs, Struves, Obolenskys, Evetzes, Sollogubs, Losskys, Rodziankos, Bloom, Sakharov, all the old ones.  They are all gone now. My third life was from 1997 on, in England, helping to create unity with the freed Russian Church among the vestiges of that emigration.

My fourth life, though becoming apparent already in the 2000s, has been since 2022 in the new and young generation of energy and faith. They know nothing of that old world, with its extreme snobbery and racial exclusivism.  Today all parts of the Orthodox Church here, especially Romanians and Greeks, not only accept English people into the Church, but even encourage us and adopt our local saints. Gone are the tiny and poor ghetto chapels of between 10 and 30 ‘holy huddlers’. Today we have mass Orthodoxy, with 200-400 at every service. It was long ago time for the old ghetto-dwellers to adapt and accept the post-Communist mainstream Church, or else close down, as they are doing.

My Background

My writings can be found from the 1980s onwards in several journals and in six published books on the Orthodox Church and Faith in Russia, Western Europe and England and on English history. Many of these have been translated into other languages. Since 2000 I have written on the Orthodox England website and blog and since 2012 I have written in Russian for the Russian website RNL. In 2022 I temporarily wrote for the website of The Saker and in 2023 for the Global South website, when I had to use the pseudonym of Batiushka, ‘for fear of the Jews’. Now I still write on the Orthodox England blog. My writings concern three main themes: authenticity, acculturation and new Local Churches.

My first theme has been faithfulness to the authentic Orthodox Christian Tradition. This means avoiding the deviations to the left-hand side of Westernisation, due to some inferiority complex vis a vis the West, that is, liberalism, modernism and globalism, as especially in the last century, and, on the other hand, avoiding the deviations to the right-hand side of nationalism, due to insecurity, that is, sectarianism, phariseeism and ghettoism, as especially over the last two generations. My second theme has been the acculturation of Orthodox Christianity into Western societies, based on Western unity and communion with the Orthodox Church in the first millennium and on our saints.

This was before the process of spiritual decomposition began in Western Europe, slowly from the reign of the barbarian Charlemagne ‘Father of Europe’, at end of the eighth century on, but far more rapidly and very noticeably, during the eleventh century and after. This brings me to my third theme, the foundation of new Local Churches in the Diaspora. For only through acculturation, based on spiritual and historical fact and without deviations, can authentic new Local Churches be founded, avoiding, for example, the errors of certain in the Orthodox Church in America (OCA), the gallant but failed attempt to found a Local Church in North America, now over fifty years ago.

In the distant past I grew up spiritually in the Russian emigration both in England and in France, among people who had been adults or at least children in Russia before 1917, or, in the cases of the second emigration, adults there before 1945, before they died out. I also lived in the 1970s in Soviet Russia, worked in Greece and studied at the Russian émigré seminary of St Sergius in Paris. I was influenced by seven people. Firstly, there was the Romanian monk, Fr Raphael, son of the famous philosopher and poet Constantin Noica and who is still alive. Secondly, there was Elder Seraphim of Belgorod, a living saint, whose blessing I received through Fr Lev Lebedev in Kursk, whom I met in Russia in 1976.

Then there was Elder Ephraim of Arizona, whom I met on Mt Athos in 1978, Fr Alexei Knyazev, the brilliant rector of the Russian seminary in Paris, fifthly, Archbishop George Tarasov in Paris, who had been a Russian pilot on the Western Front in World War I, then Fr Alexander Trubnikov, the rector of the ROCOR parish outside Paris, where I served for many years, and finally the ever-memorable Archbishop Antony (Bartoshevich) of Western Europe and successor of my ‘spiritual grandfather’, St John of Shanghai. I have been an Orthodox clergyman for over 40 years, serving in France, Portugal and England, and today I serve in England as an archpriest of the Romanian Orthodox Archdiocese.

The Life and Death of the Russian Émigré Church

The tragedy of the Russian emigre Church is that after the Revolution it split into three warring parts. This split lasted until 2007 and, for some fanatics, still exists. These splits were purely political in nature. By far the smallest émigré group until 1991, loyal to the captive ‘Red’ Church inside the USSR, at times put Soviet patriotism above all else. Some of them, intensely nationalistic, defended the Soviet State and the compromises made by its hostage-bishops inside the USSR, such as denying that the Church there was persecuted. After 1991, become through emigration by far the largest of the three groups, most of its members became patriots of the Russian Federation, sometimes also nationalistically.

The second group was largely composed of Saint Petersburg aristocrats and intellectuals, often with German Baltic surnames, based in Paris. These aristocrats, already Westernised long before 1917 and emigration, were often strongly opposed to the Tsar and advocated a compromised Orthodoxy. They were known for their political liberalism and support of the February 1917 overthrow of the Tsar, their ideal being a Constitutional Monarchy or a French-style Republic. They even left the Russian Church and joined the Greek Patriarchate of Constantinople. Over 40% of the small group chose to remain there, though now, over 100 years on, their links with Russia are very tenuous.

By far the largest group, over 80%, was called ROCOR (Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia). This was composed of White Russians. Vigorously anti-Communist, some were not so much Orthodox Christians as people who wanted the downfall of the USSR and the return of their properties and wealth inside Russia. Politically very much on the right, this wing of ROCOR practised a culture, rather than a Faith. They generally had great cultural nostalgia for a vanished State. After World War II, their leading bishops left Europe for the USA. Here the best continued to have an inspiring witness, being, until 1991, the voice of the free Russian Church and faithful to its Tradition, martyrs and confessors.

However, the long-term results were disastrous, as, losing its historical roots in Russia and Europe, the Westernised descendants of the old emigres were co-opted into the CIA. Like others, I used to belong to the non-political, spiritual wing of this Russian émigré Church, most of which with many others I helped reunite with the Russian Church in Moscow in our victory of unity against sectarianism in 2007. However, within a decade, many of its members had reneged on this, refusing to integrate into closer unity. Finally degenerating into a tiny, alien sectarian group, influenced by anti-Russian US politics, it gave way to ‘Orthobros’, incels with Amish-style Calvinism, Lutheranism and Puritanism.

Those of us who know the historic Russian Orthodox Church, the Russian language, history, classical literature and, above all, real Russian people, knew that ROCOR had become an American fake, a ghetto-fantasy degenerated from Russian Orthodoxy, and become irrelevant to mainstream Orthodoxy. It would never contribute to building Local Churches, in Western Europe, the Americas and Oceania. Essentially, it had become psychopathological control freakery, a Disneyfied version of Russian Orthodoxy, and so marginalised itself. In reality, the survival of the Russian emigration is in witness to the Orthodox Faith, in new Local Churches, giving up exclusivism and working closely with other Orthodox.

The Two Problems of the Contemporary Orthodox Church

Today, two major issues face the mainstream of the 200-million strong Orthodox Church, which is made up of 16 Local Churches, on the model of the Holy Trinity of unity in diversity. These issues are the purely political division between the Russian Church, 70% of the whole, and the once prestigious Greek Churches, 7% of the whole. These are now out of communion with one another as a result of the US bribing of the nationalist Hellenist Greek Patriarchate of Constantinople and nationalist ideological pressures on the Russian Patriarchate of Moscow. Secondly, there is the uncanonical situation of the Orthodox Diasporas in Western Europe, the Americas and Oceania, which have no Local Churches.

This Diaspora issue can only be solved once the primary issue between Russian and Greek politicians is solved, for both of these have to agree as pastors with all other Orthodox on setting up new Local Churches for the multinational Orthodox in the Diaspora. Being in communion is the sign of belonging to the Church. And that issue can only be solved by decentralisation, as the conflict between Russians and Greeks was caused precisely by nationalist centralisation, the refusal to decentralise, to let go of power and money and devolve to pastoral work. For this to happen, three Centres, Moscow, Constantinople and Alexandria, need to make concessions. Solutions to this issue could be:

In Moscow

To help distance itself from politically-inspired nationalist influences and to let go, the Patriarchate of Moscow and All Rus could be renamed the Patriarchate of New Jerusalem and All Rus, moving its administrative centre to the New Jerusalem Monastery outside Moscow. It could refrock all Russian Orthodox clergy who were uncanonically ‘defrocked’, for purely political reasons, after 24 February 2022, in Russia, Lithuania, Western Europe and elsewhere. Then it could devolve and decentralise itself, initially establishing four new Local Churches in once Soviet countries, which have for over 30 years been independent republics outside the Russian Federation:

The Kievan Rus Orthodox Church (Kievan Rus being the historic Ukraine, that is, in all probability after the conflict there is over, the 12 provinces of the North-Western and Central Soviet Ukraine), to be led by Metropolitan Onufry of Kiev and his Synod.

The Baltic Orthodox Church, for all Orthodox in Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Finland, to be led by a new Metropolitan of Riga and his Synod.

The Carpatho-Rus and Hungarian Orthodox Church, for all Orthodox in the Zakarpattia province of the old Soviet Ukraine, which will probably be returned to Hungary, and for Orthodox in Hungary.

In conjunction with the Patriarch of Bucharest and his Synod, the Patriarch of New Jerusalem and All Rus and his Synod could jointly grant autocephaly to all Orthodox, bishops and people, under their joint jurisdictions on the territory of the independent Republic of Moldova. This would at last form a single Moldovan Orthodox Church, centred in Chisinau. Moldovan Church unity could at last become real. At the same time the Patriarchate of New Jerusalem could refrock all Orthodox clergy, whom it uncanonically ‘defrocked’ for purely political reasons for joining the former Metropolia of Bessarabia of the Romanian Church, the present Romanian Metropolia centred in Moldova.

In Istanbul

In response to these decentralising concessions by Moscow, a new Patriarch of Constantinople could move the headquarters of that Patriarchate from Istanbul, where fewer than 500 Orthodox actually live, to Thessaloniki in Greece. It would absorb the Greek Orthodox Church, uncanonically set up in Athens by the British 200 years ago, though keeping Turkiye as part of its historic, canonical territory. This would at last free the Church from political interference by the Turkish government. It could recognise the five new Local Churches created by Moscow (and one together with Bucharest) above, instructing its small groups there to join the new Local Churches, and to recognise the situation in Africa, as below.

In Alexandria

The colonial administration of the Greek Pope and Patriarch of Alexandria and his Synod could cede jurisdiction of Africa to found an authentically African Orthodox Church, headed by a single African Patriarch, with the title ‘of Alexandria and All Africa’ and a Synod of mainly African and some Greek and Russian bishops, centred in Kampala. Greek, Cypriot and Russian bishops at present in Africa could either join the new Patriarchate of Alexandria under its African Patriarch, or else return to Greece, Cyprus or Russia. All clergy ‘defrocked’ by the Patriarchate of Alexandra for political reasons since 2019 could be refrocked. Thus, there would be 20 Local Orthodox Churches.

Afterword

These are the first of my hopes for the future of the Orthodox Church. If communion, which is the sign of Orthodox Christianity, can be restored between the three above Local Churches under new Patriarch-shepherds, the path will be open to holding a Council of the whole Church. There can only be one question on the agenda – the situation of the Orthodox Diasporas. There are other questions, but they are all pastoral and can be dealt with by Synods of Local Churches. The Diasporas need new Local Churches, with autocephaly granted by all the Churches together. This would create four new Local Churches; for Western Europe, Northern America; Latin America and the Caribbean; Oceania.

An Interview with a Russian Countess

Countess Benckendorff, a parishioner since 2010, has kindly agreed to be interviewed about the contemporary situation in Russia. We have recorded her answers, slightly edited, below.

 

Q: Can you tell us something about the Benckendorff family? I presume it is a German name.

A: The Benckendorffs were Saxons, not Germans. The Germans persecuted us. We were first recorded in 1240 in the village of Benckendorff in Saxony in eastern Germany, from where we became known as von Benckendorff. 300 years later some of our family settled further east in the Baltics, at first in Riga, then near Tallinn. After the Baltics had been absorbed into the Russian Empire, many of the family settled in the Morshansk area of the Tambov province, where in 1775 we were awarded the Sosnovka estate of 8,000 acres. In the early 19th century we were made counts in gratitude for service to the Tsar.

After 1917, part of the family, including a cousin Alexander, who was the last ambassador of the Tsar to Great Britain, emigrated. He passed away in 1917, but belonged to the Germanised Lutheran-Catholic side of the family and did not even speak Russian very well. He was allowed to write his reports as ambassador in French, which everyone in Saint Petersburg spoke fluently at that time. However, his family, who were Orthodox, came to live in Suffolk because of the agricultural connections of the Benckendorff family. Suffolk farm machinery was used in Sosnovka.

Thus, our branch of the family had been Russianised in the late eighteenth century and became Orthodox. After 1917 we remained in Russia, still living in Morshansk in the Tambov province. Obviously, we lost everything and we had to hide our identity, changing our surname in the 1920s, but we always remained faithful to the Orthodox Faith, the Tsar and Rus, to all our traditions. We were always different from others and members of our branch of the family never became members of the Party. We did not want to be Sovietised.

Q: What happened to your family inside the Soviet Union?

A: Our family suffered. In 1937 one of our family, who had been sent to the camps, was shot for being an Orthodox priest and is venerated as a New Martyr.  We have his icon. He is our family saint.

We lived all over the European part of the USSR and there are still Benckendorffs in the Ukraine (including a famous film-maker), Belarus and the Baltics, as well as Russia. Since the fall of the USSR, as you say in English, we have been scattered to the four winds. Some of us now live in England, Denmark and the USA. In England we attend the Romanian church, in the USA the OCA. We are the new White emigration, though we still use our 1920s name. It is just too complicated to change our name back for the moment. But that will come. I and my husband are talking about doing this at this very moment.

Q: You mention the Ukraine. What is your view of the conflict there today?

A: The Ukraine? First of all, people must understand that the war there is nothing to do with the Ukraine. It is between Western imperialism with its wealthy oligarchs who control the USA, and the rest of humanity with its poor people who are represented by Russia. The war is between the globalist rich like Soros and Schwab against humanity, between the elite minority with its media dictatorship, arms merchants, global warming, artificial covid and transgenderism, and the vast majority of the world with its ordinary people who just love their homelands and their families. The naïve Ukrainians are being used as paid mercenaries by the rich West as cannon fodder. As the Western elite said, they will fight till the last Ukrainian. They will not die themselves because they do not believe in anything, except in themselves. They are all narcissists, so others die in their name.

The origin of the Ukrainian tragedy is in the overthrow of the Tsar in 1917. He was the one person who linked us all together, the central point. After he was overthrown, what could you expect? There was no unity left, nothing to fight for. Through weakness and lack of principle, willingness to sell themselves for money, first the western Ukrainians allowed themselves to be conquered by the Nazis and then by the Americans. They always go wherever they imagine they have an advantage. Nazis and Americans are the same thing, those so-called Ukrainians are Nazis.

Until all the peoples of the former USSR have truly repented for their ancestors’ sin in 1917, there will be conflict among its former peoples. I just hope that the conflict in the Ukraine is the last post-Soviet conflict, with the other conflicts of the traitors in the Caucasus, in Georgia and Armenia, and elsewhere. Then there can at last be the restoration of the real Rus and all the other countries will be free.

Q: What do you think of the old White Russian emigration?

A: They had to emigrate. It was that or be killed by the Bolsheviks. But most of them were also against the Tsar, they overthrew him, they were just right-wing atheists like the Bolsheviks, who were left-wing atheists. Many of the so-called Whites entirely lacked patriotism. Some of them supported Hitler invade Russia during the war and today their descendants support the Americans, which is the same thing. Nazism is an inherently Western colonial ideology, German or American, French or British, Belgian or Italian, Spanish or Portuguese, Austrian or Dutch. It was all about killing and exploiting others who are considered to be inferior subhumans, Untermenschen, as the Germans called them. What is this forced imposition of transgenderism, if not Nazism? The name NATO, which was staffed by German Nazis from the outset, even sounds like the word Nazi.

Q: Should all Russian Orthodox be under the jurisdiction of the Moscow Patriarchate?

A: How is that possible? That is absurd! The Moscow Patriarchate is a house divided because it still has to be cleansed of Sovietism and post-Sovietism. It is very, very corrupt and many of the bishops are just capitalist oligarchs, interested only in money and luxury and they defrock good priests for disagreeing with their Sovietism and denouncing them for their corruption and immorality. The fools-for-Christ tell the truth, not the bishops. If the bishops told the truth, we would not need fools-for-Christ. Some of the bishops are atheists or moral perverts, just as they were in the Soviet period. Look at Filaret with his palace in Kiev. It is shameful.

Most of the Russian bishops should be sent to monasteries to repent for the rest of their lives. Only, if they were sent there, you would see that most of them would run away and defrock themselves. Anything except repent! Like that awful Bishop Maxim in London, who ran away because he was running a drugs factory in Saint Petersburg with his boyfriend. That is the level of so many Russian bishops today, here or in Russia. They are on the same level as the Greeks from Istanbul. There is no difference between them.

True, after 1991 the Patriarchate made the first leap – from the theory of Soviet ideology. But it failed to make the second leap – from the practice of Soviet corruption. Nowadays you can be an atheist in the Church, all you need to do is decide which Church group you as an atheist want to join.

Here in England, for example, I have been horrified by ROCOR. It is full of American agents, it is an anti-Russian organisation, just a Fascistic branch of the CIA, right-wing atheists. Little wonder so many in ROCOR sided with the Nazis against Russia then. Now they are doing it again. ROCOR refuses to be nice or negotiate and thinks that by being nasty and punishing, it wins. In fact, it punishes itself and loses, just like the US government in its dealings with other countries. Treachery is everywhere. As someone said, the persecuted Church has become the persecuting Church. The greatness of the Russian Church is when it is persecuted. It is not in its bishops, with rare exceptions. And certainly not in today’s bishops.

Q: How do you see Western Europe?

A: It is so sad. Old Europe is dying. I think present Europe, which has already become very decadent, will have to hit rock bottom before it can be reformed. Only then will the various nations of Europe be able to negotiate with Russia and return individually to having normal relations with Russia, the wider world and with each other. Probably Europe is not far off rock-bottom now. My husband fears the situation in France especially. He says there could be a revolution there, if a military coup does not take place first.

Q: You have lived in England for 14 years and speak English fluently now. How do you see England?

A: When we first came here, we knew nothing. I had studied German at school and my husband French. We just came to work, to survive, like everyone else. But now we have come to appreciate and love Old England, the countryside, the thatched cottages, the traditions. For example, we go regularly to Ely to venerate St Audrey, whose hand is still venerated there, still making the sign of the cross over the city through all these centuries. Her presence is there. But we also see how Americanised modern England has become, like the rest of Western Europe in general, even the Catholic countries in the south.

For example, a few days ago when I had a day off, we were sitting in the lovely Abbey Gardens in Bury St Edmunds, another city of a saint. Two schoolgirls, aged perhaps 9 or 10, walked by in their lovely uniforms. So sweet and innocent. And we thought this is the real England. And then a very badly-dressed young man, his face covered in tattoos and pieces of metal, walked by, wearing a ragged T-shirt with the logo of an American baseball team. My husband said that he must have many psychological problems to do that to himself. I mean you can remove psychological complexes, but how can you remove tattoos on your face? He had come from another planet, as far as I am concerned. Two different worlds.

Of the real England, there are still some beautiful fragments left. We have recently been on holiday in Shropshire. How lovely it is there. But I fear that England has fallen too far and cannot now be restored. Though there are still many English people who are very kind. As for the government and British politicians, I have no time for any of them. They are all liars and have made the lives of ordinary English people much worse. Nowadays you cannot find a dentist in England. Why? Because the politicians gave all our money to that atheist and murderer Zelensky.

Q: What do you think of the Royal Family?

A: There is not one any more. Queen Elizabeth was the last who still had something. We watched her funeral on television. That was the funeral of Old England. When England is free again, you will need to find an English noble family to replace all those ‘royals’. You need a new Royal Family for England. You need an Alfred II, a Patriot-King, not a false one paid by those behind the government to do and say whatever they order him to do.

Q: You have had British citizenship for four years now. Will you vote in the elections in the UK?

Only for a party that promises to stop arming the Kiev regime and help end the war there. Is there such a party? All over Western Europe the US-chosen elites are just hanging on to power, but they will be swept away by their peoples. They are war criminals, responsible for the deaths of all those poor Ukrainians, who would have been happy to live in peace with Russia years ago, if the elite had not wanted them to make war against Russia.

Q: Do you think you will return to Russia one day?

A: We have friends who have already returned, but we are attached to East Anglia. Tsar Nicholas came here, to Sandringham and Kings Lynn. We would like to open a memorial church in Kings Lynn, dedicated to the Imperial Martyrs. As regards returning to Russia, we both prefer to wait until the new Tsar. We want to be in Russia for his enthronement. Then we shall see.

Q: The new Tsar?

A: Yes. After President Putin, who does not yet love Tsar Nicholas, there will be a Tsar.

Q: Are you sure?

A: Of course, the saints and elders have said so. See how already the best of the Tsar’s Russia is being restored and reconstituted even now. Everything that was good about the Tsar’s Russia – policies like free medicine and education, including higher education for women, were kept by the USSR – is being restored. Look at how North Korea is now allied with Russia, as it was until 1904 when the Japanese treacherously attacked Russia and went on to destroy Korea.

Recently Russia became the fourth largest economy in the world, as it was in 1914. It will overtake the USA eventually. And then see how Russia is forming a mighty coalition with countries which wanted to be with Russia or were supported by Russia before 1917, with India, South Africa, Iran, Ethiopia, Thailand and many other countries like Vietnam and Algeria, Afghanistan and Cuba, Indonesia and Turkey. The whole of Eurasia and Africa are allying.

Q: But who will the candidate for the new Tsar be? A Romanov from the emigration?

A: The Romanovs were nearly all traitors to the Tsar, even before the Revolution. The émigré Romanovs definitely cannot provide any serious candidate. That is laughable. Most of them cannot even speak Russian and many are not Orthodox! The new Tsar must come from inside Rus, as his ancestors went through the Soviet period. Only such a man can understand the peoples of Rus today. Once you emigrate forever, you become irrelevant to the Motherland. We live in the present, emigres live in the past. I do not know who the next Tsar will be, but there are many people of Romanov descent inside Rus. The prophecies say that the future Tsar’s mother will be a Romanov. God will provide. You will see.

Q: Thank you. Is there anything you would like to say to our readers in conclusion?

A: Yes, those same words again: God will provide. He always does. Do not be afraid. Everything will fall back into place.

The Restoration of Orthodox Christianity in Europe and Russia

 Foreword: European Orthodoxy and Russian Orthodoxy

On my almost daily travels through Suffolk, I regularly see flying in gardens the Suffolk flag, the golden crown crossed by the two arrows of St Edmund on a blue background. It refers to the martyrdom by arrows of St Edmund, the last King of East Anglia, in the Year 869. This was part of European Orthodoxy, the England which was defending itself against paganism because it was in communion with, and part of, the Orthodox Christian world. This is just the opposite of today, when England has gradually returned to paganism because it has for nearly a millennium been out of communion with, and not part of, the Church.

In writing these words about the love for St Edmund, I am reminded how just over 14 years ago I sat with our own Suffolk Count and Countess Benckendorff in that oasis of culture, the Munnings Museum in Dedham, Essex. Then we discussed my recent visit to our Russian Orthodox ‘catacomb’ community in Old York and next fell to discussing the poetry of Masefield, a great friend of Sir Alfred Munnings, which we compared to that of Hoelderlin, de Vigny and Tyutchev. This is Russian Orthodoxy, not brash and alien, modern American or European anti-culture, which Sir Alfred used to mock. After that conversation the Benckendorffs returned to Church life, reassured that the Church at least locally survives.

On 5 April this year we and the Benckendorffs met again, at the Cock Inn in Polstead. This time we discussed a recent visit to our mutual friend, Baroness Olga Tiesenhausen, in Surrey, to whom I gave confession and communion. The daughter of a White Russian noble, turned seamstress in exile in Paris, she loved the old parish in Meudon outside Paris, where she grew up, and our then rector, Fr Alexander Trubnikov, who was one of us who love the Tradition and therefore hate extremism of both sorts. She had recently been made very unwelcome in both Russian churches in London; the one a political extension of the post-Soviet embassy; the other under the control of pathological crazies, fanatical and culture-less converts who hate all who are not schism and sect like themselves. Tragically, through their schism they missed the great opportunity to become a canonical, but also politically free and multinational part of the Russian Church, working with others in Catholicity. They have zero understanding of the real Russian Orthodox Tradition and Russian Orthodox culture.

They ‘defrock’ conscientious and principled Orthodox pastors of integrity and of the Tradition. This imaginary punishment, as it comes from schismatics, is worn by them as a badge of honour and makes them even more popular among ordinary Orthodox and proves that they are not unprincipled bureaucrat-clerics and careerists. It is all so different from the beloved real Russian Church and its European culture in which we were all brought up, like our parishioners in Old York too. With the Benckendorffs we fell to discussing the post-Soviet nightmare, which began in 1991 and continues today. We concluded that the solution can only be in the coming Tsar and the complete cleansing of Church and State of the pre-Soviet diseases of bureaucracy and corruption (as portrayed for example by Gogol), of the Soviet diseases of centralisation and persecution (as portrayed for example in the late Soviet film The Irony of Fate), and the post-Soviet diseases of (US-imposed) militarisation and nationalism.

Introduction: The Restoration of Russian Orthodox Culture

Just before the 1917 palace revolt in Russia, falsely known as the ‘Revolution’, British spies murdered Gregory Rasputin. It was the ‘first shot of the Revolution’. His name means ‘the parting of the ways’, whereas the name ‘Putin’ means ‘the way’. His way is not the way we want to take, but we believe that it will, by the paradox of Divine Providence, lead to where we need to be. This is a quite different place from now. We have far greater aims than post-Soviet deviations. These include the cleansing of the fringes of the post-Soviet Russian Church from American schism and hate-filled sectarianism, and of the post-Soviet Russian Church itself from politicking, financial corruption, careerism, moral decadence and the extremism bred by them.

Together with all our dear friends in the Patriarchate of Romania, gathered over the last three decades and who have welcomed us as refugees from the vicious persecution by Russian schismatics and hysterical converts, as well as with our dear friends all over Europe, in Russia, Moldova, the Ukraine, Greece, Cyprus, the Baltics, Belarus, Poland, Finland, Slovakia, Hungary, Albania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Czechia, in the cleansed St Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in Paris and our friends in the churches in Geneva and Baden-Baden, we will see the Russian Church restored to what Tsar Nicholas II wanted it to be. That is what the whole mainstream Orthodox world also needs it to be. The Orthodox world has been patiently awaiting this restoration for generations. The now very isolated Local Church of Russia has not yet taken up in the spirit of Catholicity the place waiting for it in the concert of the sixteen Local Churches, of which it is only one, albeit by far the largest in number. Only together can they be the voice of God.

Instead, it isolated itself by its refusal to turn the other cheek when uncanonically attacked by US-financed and homosexualised Constantinople in the Ukraine. Then it imposed on itself the further isolation of cutting of communion, followed by uncanonical revenge in Africa, and nationalistic and militaristic politics. The martyred Tsar’s vision of the restored, pre-Imperial Church, like the church of the Fyodorovsky Icon which he built in Tsarskoe Selo and which was restored over a decade ago, is also ours. It is like our church, also free of the decadence that began with Peter I, free of its decadent iconography and Italianate opera singing, its theatrical ritualism, bureaucratic clericalism, anti-pastoral, Statist rigidity, money-grubbing and love of luxury, nationalistic and militaristic phariseeism, hatred for others, and practice of rare communion – at best once a year.

The whole Orthodox world, not least here in Western Europe, awaits a restored, post-post-Soviet, broad and benevolent Russian Church, a Church of European culture, not of convert fanaticism or of narrow, nationalistic and militaristic post-Soviet politics, without sympathy for others and without mission. And we are the majority, the mainstream, representing all the free Local Churches, fourteen votes against two. This is the future of European Orthodox culture, though not of modern Europe. Modern Europe, for all of us heirs to Tsar Nicholas II, is like someone intent on committing suicide, both economic and moral, by hating Russia. Russia is poised to become the fourth largest economy in the world, overtaking Japan. (Russia has already overtaken Germany, indeed the latter is about to be overtaken by Indonesia). Let us look at the example of Great Britain to find the roots of this suicidal bent.

British Establishment Hatred for Imperial Russia

Emperors Paul I (+ 1801) and Nicholas II (+ 1918) of Russia were both removed and then murdered as a result of plots hatched by the British ambassadors in the Saint Petersburg of their times. As John Gleason points out in his 1952 book The Genesis of Russophobia in Great Britain, systematic and institutionalised British Establishment hatred for Russia began after the liberation of Paris by Russian troops in 1814, which had shocked Britain. This Russophobia was ‘an artificially manufactured product’ of ‘a campaign of a relatively small number of men’ who ‘won acceptance for their views by force of repetition’. In other words, if you repeat the lie often enough, it will stick. It was all about the British elite’s fanatical ambition for world hegemony. No rivals could be allowed.

Thus, the British ruling caste, ‘the Establishment’, engineered wars in which European countries destroyed one another, thus destroying any rivals. It was the same divide and rule policy of the pagan Romans, whom the British elite so admired. Thus, the Victorian Age became that of the purely British Establishment-invented ‘Great Game’, of which the Russians had never heard. In this the British Establishment obsessed itself with its deluded idea that Russia wanted to liberate British-occupied India. This self-delusion led the British Establishment to invade Afghanistan and lose three wars there, to occupy Cyprus (from where it now feeds the Israelis with bombs to genocide Palestine), to help finance the Suez Canal, to arm Japan to the teeth and get it to invade Russia, and then to invade and massacre in Tibet. All unnecessary.

Such British Establishment-orchestrated Russophobia was even reflected in the 1905 children’s book by Edith Nesbit, called The Railway Children. It came as no surprise, for London has long been a centre for plotting and exiled Russian traitors like Herzen, the murderous anarchist Bakunin and then the genocidal and Christ-hating Lenin. Even the evil Trotsky-Bronstein was later sent from arrest to Canada to foment revolution in Russia by the British elite. Today London is again the welcoming centre for anti-Russian oligarchs.

Conversely, the Suffolk Benckendorffs had a relative, Count Paul Benckendorff, who always remained faithful to the Tsar, as he recorded in his book The Last Days at Tsarskoe Selo. As the martyred Tsar’s noble sister, Olga Alexandrovna, who knew Count Paul, somewhat naively wrote: ‘My best friends and so many of my relations are British and I am devoted to them and to much in the English way of life….It has never been possible to discuss with them the utterly vile politics of successive British Parliaments. They were nearly all anti-Russian – and so often without the least cause. So much of British policy is wholly contrary to their own tradition of fair play’ (The Last Grand Duchess, Vorres, P. 240).

British Establishment Hatred for Soviet Russia

Through meddling in Russia in 1916 and 1917, the British elite inadvertently set up the USSR. They had imagined that they would remove the Tsar and then a group of selected oligarchs (that is, British-style aristocrats and ‘liberals’ like the transgender murderer Yusupov – there is nothing new in LGBT) would set up a British-style ‘constitutional’, that is, oligarchic, monarchy. It was clear to anyone outside the West that this would never happen in Russia. So the deluded British indirectly ended up imposing an evil Tsar, called Stalin. And then they sent Hitler to destroy the USSR. Only once again, it all went wrong. Instead of the Nazis destroying the USSR, the USSR defeated the Nazis.

Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz and the other horror camps of Western anti-Semitism, despite Churchill who unnecessarily genocided Leipzig civilians as a warning to Soviet troops. Yet they still arrived to liberate Berlin from the Western dictator Hitler, just as they will soon do when they liberate Kiev from the Western dictator Zelensky. The shock of 1945 Berlin was a repeat of 1814, when Russian troops liberated Paris from the Western dictator Napoleon. And so in 1945 Churchill thought up his ‘Operation Unthinkable’, in which the US, Germany and the UK would invade their supposed ‘Ally’, the USSR, and destroy it. Only nobody wanted that, though the Americans did drop nukes and kill 250,000 Japanese civilians as a warning to the USSR and began the ‘Cold War’, proclaimed by Churchill soon after.

After World War II the half-American Churchill reluctantly handed over the tattered remnants of the British Empire to the Americans and the British Empire became the American Empire. However, the latter had no colonies, it was a rogue-state which camouflaged its hypocritical asset-stripping greed behind the excuse of bringing ‘freedom and democracy’. So it brought the debilitating slavery of poverty and the corrupt tyranny of capital to the banana republics it created. Who cares about freedom and democracy, when you have nothing to eat and drink? As in Latin America, Africa, Italy, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and Gaza.

Even in 1956, when the US abruptly shattered British delusions of empire at Suez, and the British Establishment finally began to admit that it was only a US satellite, the British flattered themselves that they still had ‘a special relationship’ with the US. It is special, like every master and slave relationship. However, such a relationship also infects the master, for he too becomes vain, just as emperors, including those who have no clothes, become vain when they are constantly flattered by yes-men courtiers like the British Cameron and court jesters like the British Johnson. Thus, when the USSR fell because of its economic failure, because, as they said at the time, its Marxist centralised economy could not even supply its women citizens with hygiene products, the US imagined that it had defeated Russia. It is as delusional as the British imagining that they still have an empire.

British Establishment Hatred for the Russian Federation

After 1991, the British took part in the general triumphalist contempt felt by the Western world for Russia, and in the rape of Russian assets, inviting thieving oligarchs to come and live in London. The West failed to understand that Russia had not been defeated. Certainly, in 1991 the Soviet system collapsed, just as in 1917 the Imperial system had collapsed. But a temporary political system is not a country, especially it is not the largest country on earth with its millennial civilisation. The transformation of the Russian Empire into the Soviet Empire and then into the Russian Federation did not persuade the West that the real Russia could survive the failed Western political and economic systems imposed on it.

This age-old Russophobia has been summed up in the recent book of the perceptive Swiss author, Guy Mettan, now translated into English: Creating Russophobia: From the Great Religious Schism to Anti-Putin Hysteria. When Britain finally began to understand that the West had not defeated Russia in the 1990s, it invented or took part in various sad conspiracies to frame and discredit the new Russia. First, there was Litvinenko, then the Skripals, then MH17, shot down by Ukrainian Nazis, then the plot to destroy the Russian Federation through helping to arm and train the Neo-Nazi Kiev regime in British military camps, the terrorist attack on Nordstream, the deployment of British Special Services to the Black Sea and British PR companies to the propaganda department in Kiev, with their invented ‘Bucha’ narrative myth and such like.

The British Establishment has shown itself to be the most aggressive of all the Western Establishments for absurd propaganda rhetoric during the US proxy war in the Ukraine and in the ‘Cancel Russia’ campaign. It is a fact that even at the height of Nazidom, there was never any ‘Cancel Germany’ campaign. Indeed, the British theme tune for the liberation of Western Europe from the German Nazis consisted of the opening notes of the German Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. The British Establishment took a zealous part in applying the 16,500 illegal and backfiring sanctions against Russia in order to destroy it. They failed and made Russia even stronger. It tried to regime-change Putin, quite possibly the most popular leader in Russian history. It failed and made him even more popular. It sent Kiev regime Nazis against the Ukrainian people. It failed and Ukrainians defected to Russia. It decided the only way of winning was through creating terrorist attacks such as that on Crocus City Hall. It failed and made tens of thousands of Russians volunteer to fight against the West in the Ukraine. Today the British MI6 continues to supply Neo-Nazis with weapons in the Ukraine and the Baltics, just as it did throughout the 1950s. In their vain imagination they are working for ‘the Anglosphere’. In fact, the reality is that they are slaves to the Americanosphere.

Russia will not disappear as a reality, whatever the wishful thinking of Hitler or Thatcher, who both equally wanted to reduce Russians to a few millions of people to be herded onto ‘reservations’ for the natives in Siberia, as they openly declared. Millennial Russia will always continue in one form or another, for the moment as the tripartite Union State of East Slav Rus. In the face of the new reality of the rout of its Kiev regime proxies and the cleansing of the Ukraine from Nazi tyrants, the USA will make peace with the Union State. After seeing the US abandoning its failed Ukrainian tool and with NATO and the EU collapsed, the Western European war party, including the British Establishment, if it is not first overthrown by the English, the Scottish and the Welsh who yearn for basic health care, schools, roads and social justice, will be replaced by real leaders. They will be the peace-party, who will make peace with the Union State of Rus, because they look eastwards to the future towards Eastern Europe and Eurasia, and not westwards to the past across a vast and empty ocean.

Conclusion: The End of Western Superiority

The Western war against Russia in the Ukraine is existential for Russia. It is in fact a repeat of the 1962 Turkish missile crisis, (known absurdly in the West as the ‘Cuban’ missile crisis) which the USSR won, when the US was forced to withdraw its missiles from the Turkish-Soviet border. However, this Ukrainian war is not at all existential for Western people, only for the Western ruling class, because it has invested everything in its superiority complex, of which this war is its expression. For the British and the Western Establishment in general, the war is existential because the mere existence and survival of Russia challenges its delusion that it is exceptional, superior and indispensable to all others.

American and Western European elites declare: ‘It is essential that the Ukraine win’. But it is not essential for the peoples of the West or for the peoples of the Ukraine, only for the Western and Ukrainian ruling class, so that they can cling on to their stolen power and stolen money a little longer. Western Europe is certainly not indispensable to Russia, though Russian culture, like Russian gas, is indispensable to Western European peoples. Russian gas can give physical energy back to Europeans. And real Russian culture, which is still largely buried beneath the weight of present post-Soviet Russia, is that of Europe. It is far more European than the modern, Americanised, cultureless Europe of today’s elite. Real Russian culture, once fully revealed, can give spiritual energy back to European people.

After Russia has discredited ‘Western values’ (= orders from the Washington elite), the Western millennium will be over. The time is over, when the American elite arrogantly tells the Central Asians, the British elite tells the Chinese, and the French elite tells the Africans, how to live their lives. Nobody wants to live in the decadence of the modern West. Today the USA has accumulated 34 trillion dollars of debt, which is increasing unsustainably by one trillion dollars every 90 days, 10 trillion dollars every 30 months. It is estimated that it will take 800 years to pay the debt off. Who wants to join bankruptcy? Geopolitical and geostrategic problems and the existence of real European Orthodox and Russian Orthodox culture are ultimately geotheological. It is all about spiritual values. One day the modern West will understand this. Only by then it may be too late.

In the meantime, we of Orthodox Europe will hold on to our European Orthodox and Russian Orthodox culture. One day, once all the post-Soviet extremes in the Russian Orthodox Church, both shrill, hysterical and homosexual American convertitis and Soviet careerism, militarism and financial corruption, have gone, Russian Orthodox culture will find its rightful place in the mainstream of the great conciliar symphony of multinational Orthodox culture. This is not a place of domination or of intimidation of the fourteen free Local Churches by politicised Greeks or politicised Russians, but a place of international co-operation and diplomacy, of the Catholicity of the Church, of the Word of God, not of the CIA or of Papal-style personality cults. Then the real Russia will be restored – after over 300 years of erring along the torturous paths of Imperialism, Marxism and post-Sovietism, imposed by Western hatred for Russia and accepted by the anti-patriotic inferiority complex of Russian traitors.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In Memoriam: The Russian Emigration Church

Those of us who became part of the Russian Emigration Church half-way through its life, back in the 1970s, have been betrayed by the direction of the post-Soviet Russian Orthodox Church. We knew quite well such figures as Metr Antony Bloom (I was tonsured reader by him in January 1981), Archbishop Basil Krivoshein, Archbishop George Tarasov, Archbishop Antony of Geneva, Archbishop Seraphim of Brussels. Whatever their ‘jurisdiction’, their spirit was the same – that of piety, that of non-possession, that of pastoral care, that of faithfulness to St Sergius of Radonezh, St Seraphim of Sarov, St John of Kronstadt, to the New Martyrs and Confessors. And their spirit was a missionary spirit, a multinational spirit, not a narrow nationalist spirit. Today all those bishops are spinning in their graves, as they see the spirit of materialist possession, nationalism and narcissism that has taken over the Russian Church administration and even filters down among priests. Of them there are two sorts: those who are hireling priests for career and ‘awards’ and those, like us, who cannot be supressed, because we are priests by destiny.

The Russian Orthodox administration, called the Moscow Patriarchate, will inevitably now lose all its churches outside Russia. We were the first to leave. The strangest thing is that the Patriarchate’s strongest ally outside Russia is ROCOR. What was in its first three generations the most spiritually independent, and could still be so, has now become the most loyal servant of compromise with the world. With its history, it should have been the first to ask the serious questions. It refuses and so the task has been left to us.

How sad that a few years after the Russian Church administration had been freed of atheist persecution, it began to behave towards its faithful children not as a mother, but as a stepmother, and began to persecute us. As a result of its political compromises and nationalism, the Moscow Patriarchate has lost all authority and influence with us in the Emigration and in general outside the Russian Federation. It can no longer be the Patriarchate of Orthodox in the Emigration in Western Europe, in the Ukraine, in the Baltic States, in Central Asia, in Moldova, in Belarus. As a result, it will lose all the once Russian Orthodox Churches, Metropolias and Dioceses outside the Russian Federation. The following article confirms exactly what we began to observe since 2016, forcing us in 2022 to leave the Russian Orthodox Church after nearly fifty years of loyalty to it. It had been disloyal to us and had abandoned us. We were left with no other choice. We thank God that we were well-known to many bishops who were happy to help us and ignore the uncanonical and absurd sanctions later taken against us after we had left.

 

Another 13 parishes leave the Metropolia of Moldova and move to the Metropolia of Bessarabia. Another 50 will follow in the coming weeks

Next week, 13 churches from different districts will officially pass to the Metropolia of Bessarabia, sources close to these parishes told Radio Free Europe. Since the beginning of the Russian invasion in Ukraine, more than 60 priests from the Republic of Moldova have moved from the Metropolia of Moldova to that of Bessarabia.

Two weeks ago six priests were excommunicated by the Synod of the Orthodox Church of Moldova (canonically subordinate to the Moscow Patriarchate), because they Had joined the Metropolis of Bessarabia (part of the Romanian Patriarchate), in a few days another 13 parishes will leave the Metropolia of Moldova. Next week, these churches are to receive the re-registration documents from the Public Services Agency.

One of the parishes that has already changed its metropolitan in documents is the church of the Holy Archangels Mihail and Gavril from Malcoci village, Ialoveni district. Its parish priest, priest Andrei Oistric, was until recently Dean of the Faculty of Pastoral Theology at the Academy of Orthodox Theology, part of the Metropolia of Moldova.

“I studied in Suceava and Bucharest and I was always closer to the Metropolia of Bessarabia. I have dedicated more than half of my life to theological education: for 13 years I was a teacher, spiritual priest and deputy director at the “Regina Maria” girls’ high school theological seminary and for another 12 years I worked at the Academy of Theology, of which 10 years I was Dean. My feelings for Romanian Orthodoxy were not a secret. All my colleagues and students knew this,” priest Andrei Oistric told Radio Free Europe.

How does the transition from one Metropolia to another take place?

The parish priest from Malcoci says that he wanted to move to the Metropolia of Bessarabia 15 years ago, when he came to the village, but the people in the community were not ready. “Since the war started, I have had more and more requests from the parishioners: “Father, look at how the war is supported, it is not good like that!”. I was also affected by this war, and so was my family. I have relatives on both sides. I showed this desire at the end of February-beginning of March, and in August the parish of Malcoci village officially passed from the Metropolia of Moldova to that of Bessarabia”, explained the priest.

The transition from one Metropolia to another is done through a legal procedure. Parishes are re-registered with the Public Services Agency. “At our place, in the village of Malcoci, a meeting was held with the parishioners and minutes were drawn up. I submitted it to the Metropolia of Bessarabia, the Ministry of Justice and the Public Services Agency. The agency gave us a new tax code, the right to have a stamp, so all the legal rights”, states the parish priest from Malcoci.

“The Russian Church was not like a mother to us, but like a stepmother”

In practical terms, however, nothing changes in the parish, not even the calendar. The priest says that he will still keep all the holidays on the old calendar. Even before officially leaving the Metropolia of Moldova, he left the Academy of Theology. His resignation was approved at the same Synod on October 25 and he was replaced by Hieromonk Macarie Crudu.

“I retired from the academy. I tried to be as fair as possible in everything. Let someone come with new forces, with new ideas. Like it or not, our roots are Latin, we don’t have Slavic roots. The Russian Church was not like a mother to us, but like a stepmother. Nevertheless, it would have been nice to say now: «Return to your natural mother, we allow you». We want to remain on friendly terms with the Russian Church, as it has been throughout the centuries”, adds the parish priest from Malcoci.

This week, the founder and vice-rector of the Academy of Theology, Viacheslav Cazacu, also declared that he had left the Metropolia of Moldova and joined the Metropolia of Bessarabia. More such announcements are expected in the coming weeks.

“The parishes that want to join the Metropolia of Bessarabia are of an impressive number, but let’s see how they take the steps. About 50 have already applied. I cannot give you the names, because that was the deal, so as not to cause confusion. Certain parishes are now in the transition process, at the documentation stage,” said the representative of the Metropolia of Bessarabia, priest Ion Marian, to Radio Free Europe.

Two weeks ago, the Metropolia of Moldova defrocked six priests who had transferred to the Metropolia of Bessarabia. On the other hand, the Metropolia of Bessarabia considers that the decision to defrock the six priests is not valid, because it has no justification “from a theological and canonical perspective”. In a press release, the Metropolia of Bessarabia urged all clerics and monks who “feel constrained by the Russian dioceses to have the courage to get out of this slavery and return to the tradition and communion of the Romanian Orthodox Church”.

In a letter sent to Russian Patriarch Kyrill in September, Metropolitan Vladimir of Moldova complained that the Metropolia of Moldova is losing ground to the Republic of Moldova due to the war in the Ukraine and that more and more priests are moving to the Metropolia of Bessarabia.

The two Orthodox churches operating on the territory of the Republic of Moldova – subordinated to the Patriarchate of Moscow and the Romanian Patriarchate, respectively – have disputed their canonical status since 2002, when the Metropolia of Bessarabia was registered, following a decision of the European Court of Human Rights.

 

 

The End of the Two Russian Emigre Church Groups

Introduction

The two Russian émigré Church groupings that took shape in the 1920s in order to be independent of the by then Soviet-controlled Moscow Patriarchate were only ever meant to be temporary formations. Time and time again the leaders of both proclaimed that they would return to the Mother-Church inside Russia as soon as the Soviet Union had fallen. As we know, even though the USSR fell in 1991, it took many years after this before they eventually did reunite, in 2007 and 2018, but both for the same reason – that they could not canonically survive and function normally, if cut off from the far larger Mother-Church, centred in Moscow.

Unity Against Extremes

We in Western Europe, frightened especially of strange political and sectarian trends coming from the US since the 1960s, very much wanted to see both Russian émigré groupings reintegrate the Russian Church and canonical norms. And we also wanted to give them back their real missionary purpose. This was the purpose defined by, among others, St John of Shanghai and Western Europe, that of witnessing to and spreading Orthodoxy worldwide, helping to form new Local Churches, while still remaining faithful to the Orthodox Tradition. In other words, both groups had to avoid two temptations or extremes. The first was that of being a closed inward-looking, exclusivist and so sectarian ghetto, which would inevitably die out, as do all ghettoes and sects. The second was that of assimilating completely or else basically becoming an Eastern-rite Protestantism or Eastern-rite Catholicism, or in any case being absorbed by the local dominant culture and also dying out.

The small Paris group, where we have family and close friends, and which reunited with the Mother-Church only in 2018, lost over 40% of its strength in so doing, for the secularising, assimilationist party mostly left it. That was in fact a cleansing. It meant that the group could go on with its mission to help build up a Local Church in parts of Western Europe, but faithfully following the Russian Tradition, while remaining independent of Russian internal politics. In other words, it wished to become a European OCA (Orthodox Church in America). With three bishops at present, it hopes to consecrate another three bishops. However, it remains a Paris-centric Church and its presence in the British Isles, as in many other parts of Western Europe, is very small and very weak. Nevertheless, it has made and will continue to make an important contribution to a future Local Church in Western Europe, into which it will eventually merge.

Americanisation

The larger, though still small New York-based group, with twelve bishops, took another line. Unable to be an ethnic ghetto because of assimilation and the loss of Russian, it chose to become an ideological ghetto. In 2021 it duly cut itself off from the Paris group in a schism, even though both were supposed to be united in One Church. The New York group had seen most of its original Russian emigres and their descendants die out or be assimilated into secular culture despite – or perhaps because of – CIA funding. Thus, it had become almost wholly reliant either on parishioners from the former Soviet Union or else on poorly integrated and puritanical converts seeking their ideal of an exclusivist fundamentalist ‘One True Church’ sect. They knew nothing of the real Russia and real Russian Orthodoxy, but only a Disneyfied, made in the USA, fantasy version. It was this second and highly politicised convert ethos that came to dominate the New York group.

In order to assert its control elsewhere and ensure its power fantasy of ‘another century of existence’, New York decided to ‘retire’ the old school of bishops and clergy. It would send out cultish new bishops to intimidate and close down opponents and financially exploit the peripheries of its group in Australia and Western Europe. Ass imperialists they would force those peripheries into the unipolar, ultra-conservative, New York convert mould, even ‘correcting’ their language for Americanese! This would mean their group becoming ever smaller and narrower and more isolated, creating schisms with other Orthodox, cutting itself off from mainstream Orthodox, from the majority. Parishes in insular Australia were already largely Americanised, but Western European parishes, with their tradition handed down from St John of Shanghai and Western Europe, were not. Geographically next door to Russia, Russian Orthodox in Western Europe know the real Russia and Russian Orthodox culture. They could have nothing to do with the fantasy version, cultivated on the American island far away.

Western Europe

Thus, Western European dioceses would have to be repressed and basically destroyed to fit the new and loveless, unipolar ideology of the US imperialist mould with its power-seeking and money-making ethos. The American crazy convert mentality of ‘money, money, money’, podcasts for ‘incels’ and ‘orthobros’, with punishing homosexuals or misogynists a la Andrew Tate, was alien to Orthodox in Europe. Harsh and jealous right-wing Americans and Americanised extremists, with their politicking, Vlasovite, CIA-funded Possevs, Radio Liberties and Voices of America, would never be acceptable to genuine Russian Orthodoxy in Western Europe. Thus, the New York group with its aggressive Americanisation and bullying schismatic sectarianism signed its own death-warrant in Europe. A censorious and sectarian Russian old calendarism had no attraction for normal Orthodox Christians, whether for the converted, or for Russians. Isolationism and hate-filled sectarianism repelled.

Therefore, most ex-Soviet parishioners did not feel at home in the New York group in Western Europe and would have preferred to attend Patriarchal churches, linked with their homeland, had they been available. Talking to the Orthodox bishops with whom I had studied at seminary or whom I had known when they were young priests, the reaction to the Americanisation or ‘convertisation’ of the old European ROCOR was universally the same: amazement and sadness at the destruction of a genuine spiritual, ascetic and liturgical heritage and its slandering by know-nothing neophytes without monastic experience. However, looking at the schismatic and sectarian mentality responsible, the whole thing then began to appear laughable. The reaction confirmed just how bad the New York group’s reputation had become in recent years. ‘Oh, that uncanonical sect’, was the typical dismissive reaction among clergy of other Local Churches.

The Coming Collapse

Once the divisive conflict in the Ukraine is over and the Patriarchal Russian Church returns to its freedom and so destiny, the fate of the New York group will be decided. In Western Europe, it has no future. It is out of communion with the mainstream. Its remnants will flee its uncanonical extremism and be absorbed into the dioceses of canonical Local Churches, especially of Moscow, which will by then be free to receive them. That is, once Moscow has freed itself from the effects of the divisive and all-absorbing conflict in the Ukraine, when it can begin decentralisation through a sweeping programme of autocephalisation and autonomisation, eliminating oligarchic corruption and the gay mafia.

Thus, outside Western Europe and Africa, in Australia there will surely develop a separate Metropolia (especially if Australia and New Zealand come out of their US-imposed political control and isolationism and join the BRICS political and economic bloc), as also will Latin America. In Northern America (the USA and Canada) the New York group will slowly integrate the future Local Church, founded by the great St Tikhon, whose life-giving presence is still in the OCA, which will be redefined. Surely it will be joined by the 40 or so Moscow parishes, still for the moment outside it, and perhaps be renamed.

Conclusion

After the conflict in the Ukraine is over, now providentially to be hastened by Prigozhin’s treacherous mutiny, and with the removal of certain divisive traitors in the Church, the unity of the at present very divided Orthodox Family must be restored. This will have to be through an authentic Orthodox Council unifying the totality of the Local Churches, in which Catholicity and Conciliarity alone reside. Worldwide, this will mean radical changes to both leading Patriarchates, Constantinople and Moscow. Only the reaffirmation of the Catholicity of the whole Orthodox Church can deliver us from a narrow, centralised, political and ethnic model of Church life. This has already happened so many times in our two thousand-year history. Only a real Council can lead to canonical Orthodox unity everywhere, not least in the Diaspora of Western Europe, the Americas and Oceania.

 

The Tragedy of the Russian Emigration: The Land of Lost Opportunity

Since the reunion or reconciliation of the Russian emigration and the Moscow Patriarchate (MP) in recent years, many voices, both in Russia and also abroad, have asked: ‘Why continue a separate existence? Since the fall of the USSR, the 100-year old Russian emigration has no more reason to exist separately, it is an anachronism, it should fully integrate the MP’. The answers given by Russian emigration bishops said: ‘But we are distinctive. They wear black vestments during Lent, we wear violet; they wear red vestments for Easter, we wear white; after our bishops wash their hands before the Great Entrance, they shake the drops of water onto the people, MP bishops do not’. Other self-justifying and equally minor ritual variations were also quoted, most of the emigration variations wrong anyway! Some readers may think we are inventing these absurd justifications for separation. We are not. We can quote times, places and names.

We always took another line. That the Russian emigration could and should continue its distinctive traditions. Not the ritual ones, but the real ones:

  1. Instead of behaving like pre-Revolutionary (carriages with black horses) Soviet (luxury black Chayka and Zil cars) and post-Soviet (black Mercedes or SUVs) bishops and living in palaces in the lap of luxury, all emigration bishops could have continued to live humbly and modestly like the émigré bishops who had dominated the Russian emigration until about the Year 2000 when they died out, their model being St John of Shanghai. Instead: Often a purely voluntary imitation of the worst Soviet-style examples.
  2. Instead of having churches like railway stations, people going in and out just to light candles, giving the impression that few are praying, the Russian emigration could have continued as it used until about 2000, with real parishes, parishes as communities, where people knew one another and helped one another. Instead: Generally, an imitation in order to take more money for effeminate luxury and gain more power and impunity.
  3. Instead of doing whatever the post-Soviet State told it to do, the Russian emigration could have continued with politically independent views on issues such as the martyred Tsar and those close to him, the two 1917 Revolutions, the New Martyrs, the Soviet Union and, more recently, the Ukraine. Instead: Generally, political dependence, sounding brass and lack of Love.
  4. Instead of pursuing a policy of Russian nationalism, the Russian emigration could have continued with its old internationalism and multilingualism, actively helping to create and contribute to new Local Churches in all the Diasporas where it used to operate and so opening new parishes, boldly defying the MP wherever there were issues of principle. Instead: Fear and trembling.

As self-governing, virtually autocephalous parts of the Russian Orthodox Church, the Russian emigration was in an excellent position to be independent. It could have used that independence fearlessly to co-operate with other Local Churches, not least in Northern America with the Russian-founded OCA, and to help set up new Local Churches elsewhere. They chose not to and rather to be frightened of Soviet-style reflexes, punitive effeminacy, and protocols of bureaucracy of the worst parts of the MP and indeed to imitate them! Nobody forced them to do this. One of the reasons for it was that so many people of faith left the Diaspora Church because they feared compromises of the faith. Sadly, they joined schismatic, old calendarist groups.

Their departure created an imbalance, giving an opportunity to careerists, in love with power, money and above all with themselves, to take over. Thus, they chose the suicidal path of being inward-looking, polemical, aggressive, bullying, moralistic, right-wing, sectarian and turning into isolated ghettos, with a love of power and money. Little wonder that most Russians refuse to attend their churches. The result is that the Russian emigration is imploding. New Local Churches will be formed largely without the Russian emigration. The train has left the station. You missed it.